It’s still common to hear designers or product managers saying they’d like to run usability tests on their projects but “it just takes too much time” or that they “don’t have the budget for it”. If you’ve been reading about this topic, then you already know you don’t need to have massive resources to run tests on your products, and even more importantly, the outcome heavily outweighs the investment. Steve Krug’s book titled “Rocket Surgery Made Easy” kinda plays with this wrongful stereotype and it offers a practical, step-by-step guide to run a successful Usability Test.

It always strikes me when someone has to explain what product they are working on and struggle to formulate a concise sentence that is easy to understand. Being an Elevator Pitch or a more techie product explanation, you should instinctively be able to explain what you are doing. Usually, this is a smell for the lack of direction in the team. If you start asking a question, you will notice the absence of a product vision.

We had a blast in the last three years with RubyConf Portugal. Seriously, it was one of the most pleasuring things to do and we can not thank enough everyone that helped us put this together. All of you that attended the conference, all the speakers, sponsors, and volunteers, thank you again for all the support. But friends, it’s time for a pause. We will not be organizing RubyConf Portugal 2017.

This is the second time that I write this text. Naively I deleted the first version, leaving no chance of recovery, which caused me deep frustration. Instead of panicking about this, I took a walk, and a series of deep breaths and here I am writing the second version.

Often people ask me how a small team like ours can have relative financial success and still have time to organize two international conferences, MirrorConf and RubyConf Portugal, several meetups through the year while keeping a sustainable work environment where people like to work. I always struggle to answer this because I don’t have the contradictory, and for us it’s challenging, but it never felt like a Herculean task to pull off. After putting some thought on the subject, I believe that the primary justification is how we share responsibilities throughout the team, keeping a flat structure, while still have a culture of accountability.

One of these days I was reflecting on the similarities that we have at Subvisual. It is true that we are notoriously different in our personalities, backgrounds, and experiences, but what were the common characteristics that accidentally or by choice we all have? It’s easy to spot the values that we share as a company being present in all of us. However, sometimes it’s hard to identify if they were consequences of joining this team or if they were already there.